Fatal

by John Lescroart

  “You really want a half dozen teenagers over here every night? Or more? Be careful what you wish for.”

  She nodded, picking up her wineglass. “I know. You’re right. Okay, enough.” She indicated his plate. “Not hungry?”

  “I guess not.” He glanced down at his plate and carefully put down his fork. “You know,” he said, “now that I think about it, I think I might be coming down with something. I don’t feel good at all.”

  “You’re working too hard. Getting home at almost nine o’clock. That’s too long a day, even for an associate, and you’re a partner, if I recall.”

  “I am.” He shrugged. “And I even agree with you, but we all know that’s the job sometimes. In fact, not to be a party pooper, but would you mind if I just went up now? I’m about done in.”

  With a frown of concern, Jill stood up and came around beside him, putting her hand to his forehead. “No fever.”

  “No. Just general wear and tear.”

  “Sure. Go on up. Do you want me to come up and tuck you in?”

  “Thanks, but I think I can manage. I should be fine in the morning.”

  “Well, if you’re not, you’re staying home.”

  “I might, but let’s wait ’til we get there. Meanwhile . . .”

  “Go,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

  * * *

  By the time Jill slid into bed next to him, the digital clock read 10:45, and he hadn’t even dozed. Nevertheless, he rolled over to face her and, pretending he was just surfacing from deep sleep, reached an arm around her, held her a moment, then let his arm fall slack.

  When the boys got home together at 12:43, he swung out of bed in his t-shirt and gym shorts, went back down, and met them in the kitchen, where they were raiding the refrigerator.

  “Hey, guys.”

  “Hey, Dad.” In unison.

  “Isn’t school starting at the normal time tomorrow?”

  The twins, busted, looked at each other.

  “Just sayin’. A little late for a school night, huh? I know you think your mother and I don’t worry, but when it gets close to one, guess what?”

  Eric took the lead in their defense. “Now you’re going to say that nothing good happens after midnight. I think we’ve heard that before once or twice.”

  “You know why? Because it’s true.”

  “Come on, Dad, we’re home now. And we’ll be fine tomorrow,” Tyler said.

  “I’m sure you will,” Peter said. “But really, maybe we can shoot for midnight on school nights, as I believe we’ve discussed a few times before. For your mother’s and my sake, if nothing else. Do you think that would be doable?”

  “Probably,” Tyler said.

  “Probably’s a start,” Peter said. “Eric? How about you?”

  “Your house, your rules,” Eric said with an elaborate shrug.

  Peter yearned to shock his surly bastard of a son one time by popping a hard jab off his arm, but instead he simply nodded, his face set. “That’s an acceptable answer,” he said. “See you guys in the morning.”

  * * *

  It must have been sometime after 3:00. Peter hadn’t even flirted with sleep. Now he lay under an afghan on the leather couch in the dark television room behind the kitchen.

  Since he’d first come upstairs, he had relived the afternoon continually. He still could not believe that it had actually happened, that he had been part of, and a willing participant in, the whole thing. He traced the steps that had led them there one by one: the bizarre telephone conversation that he should have ended in the first seconds; the lie to Theresa; the walk over to the hotel; knocking at the door. Waiting for her to open it.

  So many opportunities for him to have bailed out, and none taken.

  And why not? What had he been thinking?

  Okay, when he’d been younger, just out of Desert Storm, he’d gone wild for a time. After what he’d been through over there, he figured the world owed him. So he messed around when he could—which was often—and even kept that behavior up for a while after marrying Jill, especially after the twins arrived, when she was always either too tired or flatly uninterested. He hadn’t thought it was that big a deal, but when she’d caught him at it and threatened to take the house and half his money, he’d cut it out, reached a tolerable, even good, sexual accommodation with her, forced himself to live with it, convinced himself that it was enough. This was adulthood. He was a father, played the role model to keep things smooth at his home.

  That other stuff, he had to shut it down.

  If he didn’t, there was no doubt that Jill would wipe him out—financially, professionally, any way she could.

  And today, Kate Jameson.

  How, he wondered, how could he have been so stupid to allow this threat to enter his world?

  Or maybe it hadn’t been stupid, after all. He had put in the time, supported his wife, raised his difficult sons. Maybe the world still owed him.

  He had given his all, his energy and his passion, and for what?

  He had met Kate less than a week before, and now, suddenly, she was by default among the most important people in his life. He had no control or leverage over who she was, what she wanted, or what she did. He had given her the power to wreck everything he’d ever worked for and cared about. Actually, even worse, she’d made him realize that he didn’t care about it, the life he was living. Maybe he’d simply outgrown it.

  That could never be undone. But could it stay buried and unmentioned forever? He couldn’t imagine it, not least because he could not seem to control one recurring thought: regardless of what she had said, he knew he had to see her again. The graphic scenes after that first kiss, playing and replaying in his mind, trumped all of his qualms.

  He turned on the couch and an unconscious moan escaped.

  “Peter?” Jill, standing in the doorway, a silhouette. “Are you all right?”

  “Just not sleeping,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  She came around the couch and sat. “First you can’t eat and now you can’t sleep.”

  “I know. Not a good night.”

  “Can I do anything, get you something? Maybe some tea?”

  He let out a heavy breath. “I don’t think so. I’ve just got to slow my brain down.”

  “You think it’s work?”

  “Probably. Mostly.”

  “These people, whoever they are, they’re your clients, not your life. You know?”

  “I know that. I’m trying.”

  “I’m sure you are.” She touched his face in the dark. “I’m not criticizing you, babe. I’m just saying.” After a minute, she said, “If you want to come upstairs, I could rub your back.”

  A deep sigh. “That might be good.”

  “At least better than tossing down here all night.”

  He sighed again. “At least that.”

  “All right.” Reaching for his hand, she pulled him up. “Come on, then,” she said. “And no discussion. I’m turning off the alarm.”

  4

  SERGEANT BETH TULLY KNEW THAT guns didn’t kill people; people killed people. First as a patrol cop, and now and for the past eight years as an inspector, she had always been a gun fan. She loved her Glock. She liked going to the range and keeping up on her skills; she enjoyed sitting around with her fellow cops and shooting the shit about different makes and models and bullet payloads and muzzle velocities. Though she had yet to draw her gun in the line of duty, she felt comfortable wearing it every day, wouldn’t know how she’d feel without it, and really didn’t want to find out.

  Nevertheless, she had to admit that guns frequently seemed to contribute a little something extra to the volatile mix of variables that often played a role in domestic homicides. A husband and a wife in the middle of a fight might resort to blows, or blunt objects, or plates or other dishware, or even kitchen or butcher knives, but only relatively rarely did these weapons—grabbed at random and used in the heat of anger—produce a fatal re
sult.

  On the other hand, if a gun in the house came out during an argument, the odds of somebody getting all the way to killed went up significantly.

  She didn’t buy any argument she’d ever heard for gun control. In her opinion, every law-abiding citizen in the country had an absolute right to bear as many arms as they wanted. But sometimes, as for example this morning with the Rinaldis, she was telling her partner Eisenhower “Ike” McCaffrey that she couldn’t help but think that if they hadn’t owned a gun, both of the Rinaldis, instead of neither, would in all probability still be alive.

  Ike, a forty-two-year-old skinny redhead with an acne-scarred face and pale blue eyes, didn’t agree. “No. She just would have stabbed him or clubbed him instead. Once she decided she was going to kill him, she would have found a way.”

  “Okay, him, maybe. But then done herself?” she asked. “What? Hit herself on her own head with a rolling pin? Stabbed herself in the eye? Come on. All I’m saying is that without the gun, at least she’s still alive. Maybe both of them are still alive.”

  “Yeah, okay. As if being alive is a positive in this case. So this way, one quick and painless shot to her own head and she saves everybody the trouble and expense of a trial. Whereas without the gun, we’re talking three squares and a cot for ten years or more, which ain’t cheap. So this way, the fact that they owned a gun and that she used it so effectively . . . hey, she saved the state’s good taxpayers like a million bucks, maybe more if it turned out she got sick in prison and they had to treat her for some slow degenerative disease instead of just let her die of old age. With dignity of course.”

  “Of course,” Beth said. “Goes without saying, especially from a sensitive soul like yourself.”

  They were standing on the balcony of the Rinaldis’ apartment, four floors above California Street out in the Avenues, not far from Beth’s own home on Lake Street. The Crime Scene investigative team was inside, memorializing the apartment where earlier this Friday morning Shannon had apparently first shot Frank in the bedroom and then herself in the kitchen.

  The gun still lay on the kitchen floor, several feet from Shannon’s body.

  Ike took a step over to the sliding door, glanced around at the inside scene, and came back to his partner. “So what do you say?” Ike asked. “Philosophy aside, we about done here? No question what happened, right?”

  “Damn little,” Beth said. “Gun violence.”

  “That, too. But the fight itself?”

  Beth thought it was so textbook that it was a cliché. Men who got shot by their women in the bedroom were inevitably unfaithful. “She shoots him in the bed, Ike. We’re dealing with symbolism here. Gotta be he was playing around on her and she found out. He’s probably calling the girlfriend every half hour. We check his cell phone, you watch, we’ll find out the same thing.”

  “That obvious, you think?”

  “Pretty much.” Beth shrugged. “Not you, of course, but generally,” she said. “Guys are pretty dumb.”

  * * *

  But guys, Beth believed, didn’t have a monopoly on dumbness. Not even close.

  And after her somewhat disturbing discussion on her walk with her best friend Kate just last Tuesday, she took the Rinaldi situation as a case study of what could go wrong with a little bit of symbolic overtone. It wouldn’t hurt, and it might actually help, if she passed some of the karma of that case along.

  Because sure enough, as she had predicted, Frank Rinaldi’s cell phone when they finally got a look at it had a single recurring telephone number that appeared under his “Recents” list roughly a million times in the past month. When Beth punched in that number on Frank’s phone at 10:30 that morning, the voice of a young woman answered with the words: “Frank? Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.”

  After which Beth had introduced herself as a cop and given her the bad news.

  Now, atypically shaken after the young woman, Laurie Shaw, had broken down and sobbed for five minutes on the phone, Beth sat at her desk in the wide-open bullpen on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, holding her phone in her hand. Ike was out picking up Chinese food for lunch, giving her a window of time where she probably wouldn’t be bothered, and she was going to take advantage.

  Kate sounded upbeat and happy, but after Beth’s first couple of syllables of reply, her friend obviously picked up something in her voice.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.”

  Beth sighed, relieved not only at Kate’s directness, but—surprisingly—at the opportunity to unburden herself of the load of sadness she’d apparently and all but automatically taken on. “It’s just sometimes the world. Or the world I’m in. Not that I haven’t asked for it. I’m not saying that. But sometimes it’s just so sad.”

  “What was it today?”

  She gathered herself, let out a breath, and started in. “I called this girl about an hour ago because her number was on the cell phone of a man who’d been killed. It turns out he was her boyfriend, and his death just totally destroyed her. He was the love of her life. They were going to get married just as soon as he could break up with his wife—”

  “The shithead.”

  “I know. Really. But in any event, she believed him.”

  “Of course she did. They always do, don’t they? Any kids?”

  “No.”

  “Well, thank God for that.”

  “Anyway,” Beth said, “did I tell you it was the wife who killed him? Shot him in bed, then shot herself.”

  “My God, Beth. And that’s your morning? I don’t know how you can stand it. I mean, you see all this in person, don’t you? It’s not like you hear it on the news.”

  “No. It’s not like that, not even a little. It’s a lot more real.” Then, delivering her not so subtle message. “People don’t seem to realize that this infidelity stuff has consequences.”

  Kate did not reply.

  Beth pressed on. “But anyway, this girl was so sad. It was like the end of her life, too. She couldn’t stop sobbing, couldn’t believe that this had really happened. I wanted to tell her she might have considered what she was doing before she decided to sleep with somebody else’s husband, but she’ll come around to realizing that soon enough, I suppose. She didn’t need to hear a lecture from me, not now. But she might have thought . . .” She let the sentence hang.

  “It’s just so sad,” Kate said. “And so avoidable.”

  “Heartbreaking,” Beth said. “And now here’s my partner showing up with my lunch. Do you want to walk next week?”

  “Tuesday?”

  “I’ll book it. And Kate, thanks for listening. Sorry to lay all this on you.”

  “Don’t even think about that. I love you, you know, and part of why I do is because of how you feel things.”

  “Love you, too,” Beth said. “See you Tuesday.”

  * * *

  Peter finally made it out of bed a little before noon.

  In an old pair of Dockers and a gray Nike t-shirt, he came down the stairs to an empty house. On the counter in the kitchen, Jill had left him a note that said: “I absolutely forbid you to go into work. I also absolutely love you. There’s frittata in the fridge. Love (again), Jill-Bug.”

  Briefly, he wondered if there was any way she could know. He couldn’t imagine how, unless he’d talked in his sleep. But even then he would have plausible deniability. Early in their marriage, she’d called out in the middle of the night a couple of times for Jimmy, one of her former boyfriends with whom she’d ended things long before.

  Or—the thought came unbidden and he wondered now, for the very first time—had she, in fact, ended things? Who could say that Jill hadn’t cheated on him at some point?

  “Right,” he said aloud, disgust in his voice. “I’m sure.”

  He wasn’t going there.

  And here, almost taunting, right in front of him, was a solution. A pen and a pad of paper. He sat down at one o
f the counter stools, picked up the pen, pulled the pad close.

  No. He couldn’t write it.

  He would tell her in person. He owed her at least that much. Call her at work right now, ask her to come home, tell her that he would move out, go to marriage counseling, whatever she wanted. He would make it up to her if he could. Somehow. He had no excuse other than he was weak and he had just fucked up. He couldn’t ever express to her how sorry he was.

  Except that this was not really remotely how he felt. It was the habit, he realized, acquired by living day to day in the shadow of guilt.

  Or, of course, he could save everyone from the pain and simply not tell her, ever. Just put the whole sordid, stupid thing behind him. Kate Jameson was never going to be part of his life. She wasn’t going to pursue a relationship with him. She’d all but said it. He was positive that she didn’t want to ruin her own domestic life any more than she wanted to ruin his. And if neither of them ever talked, and it never happened again, then no one need ever know.

  No pain for Jill. That was worth everything all by itself.

  But that was another habit. Did he want to live protecting Jill from reality? What about his own happiness, his own needs? What about feeling alive?

  And with the silence, after he’d grown accustomed to the silence, he would spend the rest of his days making it up to her. He’d never have to tell her why he had become a better husband, provider, father, lover, person. He would recommit here and now to their new life together. And he would never threaten that again.

  But then, of course, the lawyer within him argued, everything would be based on a lie. Could you build a good life on a basic falsehood?

  No, you could not. That would be impossible.

  He had to tell her. It was the only way.

  He got up off the stool and walked over to the phone. He started to punch up Jill’s work number, then stopped and put the receiver back down.

  Do nothing, he told himself, until he’d considered the consequences, short and long term.